The gun control debate is often highly-emotional, with both sides throwing out statistics in an effort to sway Americans to either side of the aisle. Since the Sandy Hook shooting last month, CNN’s Piers Morgan has emerged as a vocal proponent for increased gun control laws. This week, after Morgan’s very public, on-air spat with radio host Alex Jones, Ben Swann, a local Fox anchor for WXIX-TV in Cincinnati, offered up a fascinating fact-check of some of the stats that the British CNN host has been using. Morgan will surely find the results unpalatable.

Here’s a graphic provided by the Daily Mailfrom July of 2009 showing the stats cited by Swann:

It’s true that the United States has a higher intentional homicide rate: 4.2 per 100,000 in 2010, according to the UN crime statistics,a fact Charles Krauthammer argues gun rights advocates should be honest about. He argues that Obama’s gun control efforts will not have any effect, and that’s the real tragedy, here.

If we had an honest debate, the gun owners would admit that yes, of course, guns contribute to homicide – the rate in Britain where they don’t have any is 10 times as much as here, (actually it’s about 3 times as much) Japan had 11 homicides, last year – that’s a weekend in Chicago. BUT – where we’re different is we have a 200 year history and culture of gun ownership and we have a 2nd Amendment. And we have a system that believes the rights in the 2nd Amendment predate the Republic. And the point of having a government, as in the declaration, is to secure the rights. In Britain, you have no such rights, the government will control gun ownership – so unless you’re willing to confiscate, which would be unconstitutional and would cause an insurrection in this country….these things are not going to have an effect, except at the margins – and that’s the tragedy.

Wyoming lawmakers have proposed a new bill that, if passed, would nullify any federal restrictions on guns, threatening to jail federal agents attempting to confiscate guns, ammunition magazines or ammunition.

The bill – HB0104 – states that “any federal law which attempts to ban a semi-automatic firearm or to limit the size of a magazine of a firearm or other limitation on firearms in this state shall be unenforceable in Wyoming.”

The hot new video at MRCTV.org is 1995 footage of Attorney General Eric Holder, when he was the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. In his remarks before the Woman’s National Democratic Club, broadcast by CSPAN 2, Holder said people should be ashamed to own guns, just the way that cigarette smokes now “cower outside of buildings” to smoke.

“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes. You know, when I was growing up, people smoked all the time. Both my parents did. But over time, we changed the way that people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don’t want to admit it.” Laughter followed.

UPDATE:

Via Geo – this guy’s even better….

I don’t know who this guy is, but he should be making himself available to debate Piers Morgan as soon as it can be arranged. Of course, Piers prefers clownish carnival barkers like Alex Jones and Jesse Ventura.

Obama and Biden think they can control the whirlwind they are going to unleash with UnConstitutional EOs requiring God know what about our weapons-they will rue that day because they’re confusing the doormats in Congress with Americans.

Just in case there was anybody out there who may have thought this was going to be a “fair and balanced” debate over the root causes of societies gun violence, and may have thought there was going to be a “honest’ review of the problem you need not look any further that what follows. Here is the dopey lib contribution for the cause. . . . . .

The motion picture industry will not press for mandatory curbs on gun violence in films in the wake of the Newtown elementary school massacre — and, in fact, is dead set against them.

“What we don’t want to get involved with is content regulation. We’re vehemently opposed to that,’’ former Sen. Chris Dodd, who chairs the Motion Picture Association of America, told The Hollywood Reporter. “We have a free and open society that celebrates the First Amendment.”

Dodd’s declaration comes as entertainment industry leaders prepare to discuss gun violence in films and video games at a Thursday meeting to be chaired by Vice President Joe Biden at the White House Thursday.

Expected to participate are movie studio executives, National Association of Broadcasters president Gordon Smith, Directors Guild of America executive director Jay Roth and National Association of Theatre Owners CEO John Fithian.

“We want to explore what we can do to provide parents and others with the information for them to make choices on what they want to see and what they want their children to see,” Dodd told the Reporter.

Yeah, I agree Deb. I’m kinda fond of several of them myself, including the 1st and 2nd Amendments. Unfortunately for us and most other Americans when it comes to dopey libs they selectively pick and choose when and if they care for them. Most of the time, with that crowd they treated them like #1 & #2 except when it fits they’re own needs, of course!